Squish

I gained more insight into my attitudes toward strength, bravery, and resilience this week. It comes down to stress balls and Silly Putty.

I still have difficulties seeing myself as strong, brave, or resilient. For example, throughout my life I have been victimized, bullied, and abused in some way or another. Bullies, predators, and people who need to diminish someone else in order to feel bigger have found me and made it their purpose to squash me. Other children, adults, coworkers, bosses, even friends: people of all sorts have seen me as weaker than them and gone on to prove it.

My fight or flight reflex? Permanently set to flight. When the group of friends I hung out with in my 20s would get too overbearing and downright mean, instead of standing up for myself, I would take a break from them until I felt recovered. One of them even went so far as to tell me I was like a soft, furry bunny — and he didn't mean it as a cute thing but as a nonthreatening prey object. (BTW: I stopped hanging out with those folks regularly in my late 20s.)

Even some of my well-meaning friends have diminished me. Because I ask other people's opinion, many of my friends and even my mother sometimes treated me as if I were unable to make my own decisions, as if I were not quite a responsible adult. Really, because I have been single and lived alone most of my adult life, I like to get second opinions and bounce my own off of other people from time to time. Some of my male friends think of me as delicate or fragile.


One of my male friends has actually contributed to my lack of confidence in my professional life. As a driven, workaholic, successful business owner, he has specific opinions about what a successful employee looks like. My resume, with its shorter-term jobs and employment gaps, appears to him as if I am a job-hopper and am unable to hold down a job. He doesn't understand the world in the Silicon Forest, especially during the dot-com heyday when having a job for a year was considered long-term, especially with dot-coms going under almost hourly. My friend doesn't understand about working for a contracting agency and working a series of shorter-term jobs. He's never been unable to find work; he's never moved to an economically depressed area. For him, weathering the economic crises of the past decade and a half has meant he's had to lay people off. Of course, being unable to find work for such a long time gave his perspective even more credibility. But I stopped trying to explain my experience and wondered if he was right, that I could no longer do the work I'd done for so long and should just find an "easier" and less-demanding job. He also said that people may find it difficult to give me honest professional criticism because I have a "delicate personality" and people may be afraid I'll break or get my feelings hurt. Yes, I do consider him a friend; I think he is telling me things that he thinks will help me.

Many years ago, I had a boss for six years. Six long, increasingly miserable years. For reasons I could only guess at, she didn't like me and she appeared to put in some effort to diminish me. Did I work my butt off for six months, completing more projects than anyone else in my group? She predicated my very poor review on one particular project that went south due to conflicts between me and the other writer who came onto the project halfway through and conflicts with the project manager who really didn't know what she wanted. As my boss said, "Someone has to be the scapegoat." It sure wasn't going to be the other writer, who was her pet. More than once, she actually set me up for a fall, promising full backing on a project or situation then later saying she had no idea why I was doing what I was doing. I got my best reviews from her when I did hardly anything. I didn't leave until I'd had two medical leaves for mental health reasons, hit a point where she and I could only meet together with a member of HR in attendance, and I had a freelance job lined up. I should have left after two years: after three I no longer had any confidence in my ability to work elsewhere.

Did I stand up for myself in any of these situations? Not particularly. I ran, I hid, I avoided. It took me ages to recover from some of these situations and people I'm still recovering from others. It's been almost twenty years since I left the six-year job and it's only been two or three years since I last had a stress dream about it. I don't see strength, bravery, or resilience in any of my reactions.

My therapist asked me what those things do look like to me. I finally came up with the metaphor of one of those squishy "stress balls", the kind where you can poke them, but they don't squish all the way and when you stop poking them you don't' leave a permanent indentation: the ball returns to its own shape. Instead of a stress ball, I feel like Silly Putty. When someone squashes me, I flatten and am completely re-formed by their actions. I stay squashed when they remove their pressure or presence. Not only do I retain my new form, I pick up the imprint of everything I am exposed to, like when you press Silly Putty to newsprint and it retains the image of what you pressed it against.

To me, strength is like being one of those stone carvings — the Jade Buddha, the Mayan stone faces, the monoliths of Stonehenge: even after millennia of being exposed to the elements and the hands of people, they retain their shapes. It takes millennia and exposure and handling to round their edges, to blur their features at all. And even once they are worn down altogether, they will still retain the integrity of their fundamental selves: they will still be stone.

Bravery is standing up for yourself, standing strong in the face of a downpour of negativity, maintaining personal integrity in spite of  being chipped at and pecked at.

And resilience is like the squishy ball that returns to its inherent shape after being poked and prodded and squashed.

I find metaphors to be very useful. They illustrate points, they are a way for me to express my thoughts and feelings in more tangible ways. My therapist now has a better understanding of my perspective on strength, bravery, and resilience, and on my own life experiences. She had some useful things to say as far as what I need to consider and exercises that may give me more insight.

In general, I feel that my life experiences — particularly the negative ones, the losses and the bullying and the diminishing — have molded me out of my inherent shape into another form that I have not bounced back from. I feel I have no structural integrity. But I want it. I want to regain and own my inherent shape.  We are discussing if and how I can achieve those goals.

I'm going deeper than I ever have except for the past few years. I'm gaining new insights. It's taken me three damned long decades to achieve even this much. I'm frustrated, but I'm starting to feel a little hopeful again.Maybe I can re-form from Silly Putty to a squishy stress ball. Even better — maybe I can become the Jade Buddha.